On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush sent a 12-page Memorandum of Notification to his National Security Council. That memorandum, we know now, authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to set up and run secret prisons. We still don't know exactly what it says: CIA attorneys have told a judge the document is so off-limits to the courts and the American people that even the font is classified. But we do know what it did: It literally opened a space for torture.

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit we now know much of what happened in those secret spaces the Bush administration created. Under that litigation, the American Civil Liberties Union gathered nearly 140,000 formerly classified documents from the Department of Defense, the Justice Department and the CIA that detail the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody in the "war on terror." My job, as the author of the website www.thetorturereport.org and then of the book The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America's Post-9/11 Torture Program, was to dig through that incredible trove of documents and figure out for myself what, exactly, my country had done.

Here is what I learned. Our highest government officials, up to and including President Bush, broke international and U.S. laws banning torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Worse, they made their subordinates in the military and civilian intelligence services break those laws for them.

When the men and women they asked to break those laws protested, knowing they could be prosecuted for torture, they pretended to rewrite the law. They commissioned legal opinions they said would shield those who carried out the abuses from being hauled into court, as the torture ban requires. "The law has been changed," detainees around the world were told. "No rules apply."

Then they tortured. They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantanamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more.

They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.

And they conspired to cover up their crimes. They did this from the start, by creating secret facilities and secrecy regimes to keep what they were doing from the American people and the world. They did it by suppressing and then destroying evidence, including videotapes of the torture.

They managed all this, for a time, through secrecy — a secrecy that depended on the aggressive suppression of voices.

Over and over again, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantanamo, in secret CIA black sites and at CIA headquarters, in the Pentagon, and in Washington, men and women recognized the torture for what it was and refused to remain silent. They objected, protested and fought to prevent, and then to end, these illegal and immoral interrogations. While the president and his top advisers approved and encouraged the torture of prisoners, there was dissent in every agency, at every level.

The documents are full of these voices. From emails among FBI agents sharing their shock over scenes they had witnessed in interrogation booths in Guantanamo, to letters and memoranda for the record, to major internal investigations, the documents show that those who ordered and carried out the torture did so despite constant warnings and objections that their actions were ineffective, shortsighted and wrong.

It is one thing to be in the dark; it is another thing to have the record of what happened in the darkness right in front of us, and fail to reckon with it. That, sadly, is the situation in the United States today.

In March, the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported that prosecutors in Poland have charged the country's former top intelligence official with depriving Abu Zubaydah — who was captured 10 years ago last month and who became the first subject of the Bush administration's experiments with "enhanced interrogation techniques" — and others of their freedom and allowing corporal punishment in the secret prison the CIA set up and ran near the village of Szymany.

The CIA shipped Abu Zubaydah from Thailand to Poland on Dec. 4, 2002. When he arrived in Szymany — hooded, diapered, shackled — and stepped onto the tarmac with his armed, CIA-contracted escorts, he was setting foot in a country with one of the newest constitutions in the world, a nation that in the moving words of that document's preamble, remains "mindful of the bitter experiences of the times when fundamental freedoms and human rights were violated in our Homeland." Ratified in 1997 — barely five years before the CIA's plane landed — Poland's constitution declares simply, "No one may be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. The application of corporal punishment shall be prohibited."

There's something especially perverse about basing a secret prison in a country whose "bitter recent experiences" include first Nazi occupation and extermination camps and then four decades of communist oppression. Out of those experiences, the people of Poland created a state that embraces, without reservation, the absolute ban on torture, and the first thing the United States does is degrade that state by setting up and running a secret torture chamber on Polish soil.

How would Americans feel if we learned our government had secretly allowed a foreign government to violate some of our most basic laws and fundamental principles on American soil? Shouldn't we be just as outraged to know our government conspired to violate those laws and principles abroad? That it did so in secret no longer absolves us: Plenty of the record is public now; now we know.